With all due respect my understanding is that NO Vista will work (well) with legacy software or hardware that was perfectly OK with Win XP.

I have this from a barrister friend who used to earn his living in computer support, so he is no slouch at getting thigs to talk to other things.

98SE is too unstable and there are fewer and fewer things that will work with it, but I do think it is worth wiping the OS on a new computer and going back to XP Pro.